Early July Update…

OK, MJ. I was a bit over-zealous… I do get up between 7:30 and 8:00AM to exercise. Staying up until 1:30AM to read over the DocCD has a bit to do with that…

Just so everyone knows, MJ is a buddy of mine who works in IT infrastructure at my company (who I wouldn’t mind working with someday, at my present company or otherwise). One of the emails I got from him lately has been some flack about my proposed schedule for my time off, mostly getting up at 7AM to exercise. So that’s what prompted that above comment.

My “vacation” has officialy started. I am now in full-time study mode. I took my wife and son to the airport on July 1st to go to Denver to stay with the mother-in-law. My daughter has already been there a week. I just have myself and the dog to take care of (my dog, Maezy is easier to take care of than myself ). The house is quiet, but a wierd quiet without the sounds of kids; I really miss that. Well, I’ve determined that if I keep busy and studying, I won’t have much time to miss them. I think I still will though…

This week was rough to let work things go. One of my projects had a “blow up” right before I left. It’s a long story, but I was on a long conf call on Thursday to mitigate the situation and come up with answers for my management, which were out of the office at the time, luckily on thier boats on the lake or goofing off wherever. The issue wasn’t on me, but a misjudgement and miscommunication between my project manager and the support teams who we provide training for. Plus, the support teams had a new training liason, who didn’t know how things work, so he got higher level management involved, etc. Kind of an embarrassing moment for our dept., but I helped the resolution as much as possible. There’s only so much you can do from the bottom rung. After this, I promptly turned on my Out-of-Office e-mail notification and left work (and hopefully all the worries behind as well).

Well, it nice to have time to dedicate to just studying and practicing labs. I’m getting to the point where I am finishing end-to-end connectivity at around 4 to 5 hours on level 6 and some level 7 IEWB Vol2 labs. I feel good about this, since I have had this goal a lot. I got the results from my mack lab (#3) last weekend and got a 48%, an improvement from last time. This time and last time, both mock labs were level 7. As I went through the results and the proctor comments, I counted 30-35 points that I could have gotten if I was able to take a step back periodically and look at the whole picture. Some of the items that I missed are below:

• Tasks 1.5 & 1.6 Redundancy – I don’t know why I didn’t go back and fiinish this one. It was using a backup interface and end-to-end keepalives to maintain the FR circuit. After looking at the solution, it was an easy one.
• Task 1.6 PPP – Man, I just couldn’t get this to work. I later figured out that I was using the wrong authentication method on the wrong ends. The task asks for PAP on one end and CHAP on the other, but I was putting the same method for requesting and answering on the same side. Duh..
• Task 2.1 Trunking – I had the VLAN that the task stated that needed to be the native VLAN as tagged on the trunk links. I’m going to have to lab this one up and see if you can have a VLAN native and tagged on the same trunk link.
• Task 2.6 STP – This was a simple STP traffic flow task. I was adjusting the port priority instead of the root cost on this one. I need to look at the wording of the task better on this one.
• Task 3.2 OSPF – This is a classic example of one task affecting others. This task asks for authentication in all links in area 0. I totally forgot about including the tunnel link connecting a non-zero area through a transit area into this authentication requirement. This led to missing task 3.1 (two neighbors not adjacent) and 3.10 (redistribution – incomplete reachability). Arrrg… That was 9 points right there from not doing a 3 point question correctly. This is what I mean by taking a few seconds and looking back at the whole scenario, making sure all is covered.
• Tasks 4.1 & 4.2 Multicast – This is also another area where looking at it from a step back would have been needed. I missed a RPF check that needed a static mroute and also to configure broadcast-to-multicast-to-broadcast transmission.
• Task 5.2 IPv6 Tunneling – I just forgot to set the tunnel mode to IPv6IP. Uggg…
• Task 7.1 Traffic Filtering – This was a continuation of QoS. It was using rate limiting to mitigate a DoS attack – slick one guys. Use another technology in a section that seems like nothing to do with it.
• Task 8.1 SNMP – I thought I had this one in the bag. I find SNMP tasks fairly easy, since there isn’t too much to them, but I forgot to enable SNMP trapping. I could kick myself for this one.
• Task 8.2 RMON – OK this one royally pissed me off. The command wouldn’t take the description string. No matter what I did, if the string was not a connected string (all continuous chracters), it barfed at me. I ended putting in the string with underscores between the words, hoping that would be sufficient, but no… I will look this one up and see if it’s one of those questions that needs a specific order of the subcommands.
• Task 9.1 DHCP – I thought this would be a no-brainer too, but a few things I didn’t think about. I would have gotten this in a real situation, but again I needed to take a step back and look at it from a higher level. I needed to add a helper command to the remote router so the DHCP server I was configuring could service the remote network. I also forgot to specify exclusions for the router IP addresses in those subnets that DHCP would be used on. Lessons learned…
• Tasks 10.2 – 10.4 BGP – I sacrificed some of these points to get other easier tasks. It was a decision I had to make since I had about 1 1/2 hours left.

My plan is to do quite a few more labs, especially focusing on getting my core as fast as possible and finding stuff in the DocCD (Cisco Documentation) very quickly. I want to be able to do as much as I can from memory, but I still want to use the resources as much as possible.

So, in order to focus, I have taken the advice of many others when they went through the final preparations. I have:

• turned off all email and messenger, including the Groupstudy list (this has been the hardest)
• turned off all TV (except for those satellite music channels that I can chill-out to)
• committed to no extraneous web surfing, just direct study related (like www.cisco.com, etc.)
• committed and started to exercise everyday with taking extra vitamins
• simplified my life to keep focus on the task at hand
• been asking the higher power, several times a day even, for help and answers (which I have received!)

Basically, I have checked out from the world for three weeks or so (with the exception of this blog).

I have visions of what it will be like when this process is complete and I have achieved my goal of obtaining CCIE. I hold onto those visions as a motivator. i know there is something out there waiting for me and my family, but I just have to get this big step accomplished first!